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Thursday, October 30, 2014

Websphere Technical University Düsseldorf 2014 - Part 2

I started day 2 of the WTU conference with a session from Michael Hamann about some of the new features in IBM Websphere Datapower (V7) concerning the Datapower Policy Framework and Service Patterns.

The Datapower policy framework is managed on Websphere Service Registry and Repository and enforced on Datapower. This setup isn’t new, but already exists since Datapower firmware version 5.0.0. What’s new since version 7 is the possibility to use variables in the policy-config, this feature is called dynamic policy variability.

Another new feature in V7 is Service Patterns, these are templates that you can create from existing services in a new GUI, the Blueprint Console.

I experienced myself that many of our customers already created their own scripts to work with some sort of templates for the common integration scenarios, so the use of service patterns will be great for them. They will have a supported way of working that brings more features than what they have right now.

Of course not all sessions that I attended involve my working terrain, but there were still some interesting things that caught my attention:

(Photo: Twitter @bluemonki)

In the session about Cloud Integration by John Hosie, he mentioned ‘Chef’, which is a tool to automate the setup and maintenance of your infrastructure in the cloud. Check https://www.getchef.com/chef/ if you want to know more.

Of course something that came up in half of the sessions I attended is IBM’s answer to Platform as a Service (PaaS): Bluemix. One of the more impressive examples came from the same ‘Cloud Integration’ session. After syncing your local database with a cloud DB in Bluemix you can generate REST-API’s to retrieve the data you want to expose in just a few clicks.

Another hot topic on the conference was discussed by Bernard Kufluk and Bryan Boyd in their presentation about the Internet of Things (previously known as Smarter Planet). He gave us a glimpse of what the future might look like when all of our stuff is connected to the internet using the MQTT protocol. In contrast to most of the existing applications that nowadays use HTTP to send data to the server, MQTT makes it possible to send commands from the server to the client application (for example to stop a car remotely as shown in the demo). The appliance to take care of all this MQTT traffic is IBM MessageSight. My first impression is that this appliance is for bidirectional MQTT traffic what Datapower is for HTTP traffic.

The session about Blueworks Live from Roland Peisl presented another product that I likely won’t be working with in the near future, but nevertheless it was interesting to see how the product evolved since the last time I used it, back in the days when it was called Lombardi Blueprint. While obviously a lot has changed since then, the conclusion remains the same: it’s a great tool for the business to help them with process discovery sessions. If you’re looking for a tool that supports a full business process round-trip, you should rather use Business Process Manager.